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    notebook troubleshooting help

    Discussion in 'Hardware Components and Aftermarket Upgrades' started by Spiritgod, Feb 18, 2008.

  1. Spiritgod

    Spiritgod Notebook Enthusiast

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    I was asked to look at a notebook the other day. From what they told me it gets very loud and then shuts off on it's own. The first thing I thought of was overheating and so I turn it on myself and noticed the CPU goes from 97F to 168F in less than a couple of minutes. I opened it up to kind of clean it out but I think the fan is bad. My question is would a bad fan make the notebook really loud and make the CPU heat up like that? I want to get as much input as possible before I do anything. Thanks in advance.
     
  2. powerpack

    powerpack Notebook Prophet

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    Yes, a fan that is bad or going bad can make noise and not cool properly so yes that would explain. But in 2 minutes getting that hot while not under load means something else is going on. Unless fan is creating heat I suspect CPU?
     
  3. brianstretch

    brianstretch Notebook Virtuoso

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    If the notebook is old, I'd suspect that its heatsink is clogged with dust and the fan is spinning up in a futile attempt to compensate. What notebook is it? What CPU?
     
  4. Spiritgod

    Spiritgod Notebook Enthusiast

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    Well while I was testing the temperature windows was still loading. Because I thought the same thing about the cpu, but I shrugged it off because we are talking about a low end celeron that has always had trouble loading XP. I may still remove the CPU and put some AS5, just to see what that does.

    Also it seems like XP isn't loading right. I noticed that it takes a little longer to start up and sometimes the icons on the front page don't show. Could this be just an indicator that the CPU is getting too hot too fast?
     
  5. Spiritgod

    Spiritgod Notebook Enthusiast

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    It's a Toshiba A55-S1063 with a celeron m 1.5, a just upgraded 768 RAM. That's really all I know about it besides it was purchased around 3 years ago.
     
  6. Spiritgod

    Spiritgod Notebook Enthusiast

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    Ok, I took off the CPU and heat sink. Cleaned the heat sink which was very dirty. Replaced both units and the notebook still gets the same temperature readings. So I had a small idea to see if it was the heat sink, I blew some condensed air on the heat sink and I noticed a good 30 degree decrease in CPU temperature. So I am now almost positive it's the fan. Now the hard part begins. This notebook isn't like the others I have worked on, most just have a metal bracket between the motherboard and keyboard but this one has a larger plastic piece that I can't seem to get off. Guess I will be doing some more research.